I think context is key when answering this question. To an extent we can survive without statistics, to an extent we are free of those horribly mean scores.
Remeber back to when you were five years old. You’ve just finished the most hurrendeous ordeal of having to eat all your dinner despite detesting half the things on your plate. However, with bravery and true grit you have achieved this challenge and are now sat at the table with a smug smile across your face. You know what is coming, that big chocolate biscuit. Then, all of a sudden you witness the most disgusting injustice of your life; your brother gets two biscuits. Did you need to know that you received half as mush as your brother (or 50%? or 0.5) to understand the data, to understand that you had been hard done by? No you didn’t. Alas, that was an easier time.
Is it enough now to have a quick look at the data and sort of, well, guess what all of it means? Not really. Especially when we’re dealing with potentially life changing or saving research. And especially when the data looks like this:
Statistics were not put on this earth to make our lives more difficult. Actually, statistics were not put on this earth but rather developed to insure our interactions with the maths world are as pleasant as possible.
Why not just let the data speak for itself? Why do we have a statistics module as a core module? Why is it so important? Studying statistics gives us a much better understanding of the meaning of the data. For example, if a research study finds that 20% of a local population has the flu in Autumn, mathematicians can use statistics to find out if this is an abnormally high number by comparing it to averages in larger populations.
If anyone can cast their mind back to last year and remember that sometimes we are dealing with unknown populations. We have to use what ever data we have to it’s full potential to estimate other values, statistics gives us the ability to do so. Sometimes it just wouldn’t be an option to let the data speak for itself without stats as there simply would not be enough data.
Do we need statistics to understand our data? 100% yes. Do need statistics for the next smash hit?
100% no. As I said before, context is key.
Sources:
sinesofmadness 
Very entertaining blog! And I also completely agree with you, of course we need statistics, as much as people fantasize about a world without statistics, really we’d fall to pieces without them.
I also mentioned in my blog about how you don’t necessarily need statictics when studying a very small sample, but then your results wouldn’t mean much as we could potentially falsely generalise our results to the population.
Even simple statistical methods such as mode, median and range can give us an insight into our data, not a hugely helpful one, but an insight all the same.
I really enjoyed reading this blog, it was funny and simple and got to the point.
Though, I do agree with what you are saying. It is simple to know you’ve been hard done by when you get less biscuits than someone else, but analysis of raw data for a scientific purpose is completely different. Without statistics it would be practically impossible to analyse data, especially for something like a survey that over 3000 people have responded to, it would just be a bunch of numbers and answers that wouldn’t really make sense to anyone, let alone be used for scientific research. And as you showed with the SPSS data on your blog, it really is just a list of useless numbers that don’t really make any sense. Without the use of statistics we wouldn’t be able to understand our data and therefore not learn more about the world, behaviour, people etc. Simple analysis is still more effective than no analysis whatsoever.